Can you win at online gambling?

Be Aware of Your Equity

In gaming terms, your equity is your stake (bet amount) compared against your odds and payout. 

So if your chance of winning a bet is 1/10, it means a payout of 1:10 is the fairest (true odds and payout odds match). If you are only getting paid 1:8, the equity is not in your favour.

For example, if you are at an online casino blackjack table, there is often an option for side bets, such as perfect pairs or insurances. 

If you place a side bet on a perfect pair, you will win if your 2 cards are paired. The payout structure will probably be similar to this:

Combo	What It Is	Image	Pay Out Odds
Perfect Pair	2 cards, same number and exact suit.		1:30 10 euros bet: pays 300 euros
Colored Pair	2 cards, same number and same suit color.		1:12 10 euros bet: pays 120 euros
Mixed Pair	2 cards, same number.		1:6  10 euros bet: pays 60 euros

Sounds like a good deal right? 

Let’s look at the true odds of those combinations:

Combo	What It Is	Image	Pay Out Odds	Probability Odds
Perfect Pair	2 cards, same number and exact suit.		1:30 10 euros wins 300 euros	1:59 Hits 1 in 59 times
Colored Pair	2 cards, same number and same suit color.		1:12 10 euros wins 120 euros	1:52 Hits 1 in 52 times
Mixed Pair	2 cards, same number.		1:6 10 euros wins 60 euros	1:26 Hits 1 in 56 times

But you might be thinking, ‘hey Gurus, wait a minute, isn’t it profitable if i combine all the probability odds of hitting any pair at all?’ 

Smart! But you still won’t come out on top. The combined odds to give any pair at all are 1:0.89 (approximately). Which means, in the long run, you will lose 0.11 euros for every 1 euro you bet. 

Furthermore, when you do hit, you get paid way less than your actual equity. 

But before you swear off online blackjack completely, it is actually one of the most profitable (and fun) table games out there, if you play it right.

You simply have to avoid the kinds of bets where your equity is very low, like side bets, even though they are very fun. This will apply to many other games as a fairly straightforward principle to win at online gambling.

If you still want to try a blackjack side bet, you can monitor and see: if you haven’t hit any kind of pair in a while, it might be worth putting an extra fiver on that side bet bonus. 

Bankroll Control

To win at online gambling starts with limiting your losses, which starts with bank roll control.

Your bankroll is essentially your entire budget for gaming. But before going into different types of bankroll control, it’s important to first understand variances. 

It simply means winning and losing swings – sometimes you win and keep winning for a period of time, and other times your variance swings the other way and you seem to keep losing, unable to catch a break. 

To be able to deal with these variances, you need to control the amounts/stakes that you play and bet, in proportion to your bankroll.

There are 2 conventional ways to do so:

1. Play a % of your bankroll

This is straightforward enough – set each online gaming session to a small percentage of your bankroll, depending on which games you are playing. 

For example, professional online poker players conventionally try to allocate 1-3% of their bankroll. So, if you have 1000 euros, you should be playing buy-ins of 10-30 euros. 

For table games or just general online gaming sessions, we would recommend 5-10% of your bankroll per session. From there, you adjust the stakes that you play for accordingly.

If you want to enjoy a long few hours of play with your 500 euros, don’t play 100 euros a bet! That’s 5 bets, which could go really fast. 

So, if your bankroll is 5000 euros, we would advise allocating a maximum of 500 euros per gaming session, meaning if you lose 500, it’s time to stop for the day.

‘But I might win it all back!’

Don’t get desperate. Your variances are not swinging in your favour today, so you’re likely to keep losing if you keep playing.

All this talk about losing… when do we win?!?!

People often have losing limits with online casinos, but what about winning limits?

We’ve learnt that casinos create an advantage by slightly skewing their payout odds to mismatch the true odds, thereby lowering your equity. 

Which means if you play infinitely, you will always eventually lose. 

So, the formula is simple – set a good winning target, and if you hit it, LEAVE. 

Personally, i like the 2.5:1 rule. So, if my session limit is 500 euros, my winning limit is 500 x 2.5 = 1250 euros. 

Let’s project it a little: if I play 5 days a week, even if i win 2 days out of 5, my winnings would be 1250 x 2 = 2500, while my losses would be 3 x 500 = 1500 euros. So, I would still be up by 1000 euros by the end of the week.

And if I win only 1 day a week (which is unlikely if i apply the best gaming strategies (link) and all the tips here), I would only be down 2000 (4 days’ losses) – 1250 (1 day’s winning) = 750 euros, which is 12.5% of my bankroll.

Okay so now the last piece of the puzzle: time limit.

You’re not going to play for 10 hours and hover at +1200 (almost at the winning limit of 1250) or -450 (almost at the losing limit), and keep going until you hit either threshold, right?

Like we said, limit your play time to optimize your playing. So set a time limit – if you’re not at either your winning or losing limit by then, just pack up and move on to the next day.

Our recommendation is 3 hours max.

So that sums it up for percentage-based bankroll control. The next method is 

2. Range Control 

This strategy is more advanced and preferably requires some prior online gaming or casino experience. It can be applied by itself, or in conjunction with percentage-based bankroll control. It is also applied differently via several betting systems(l).

At the minimum, this approach should be used with a daily loss limit. 

Range control is simply an approach that uses adjusting your betting stakes to maximize winnings and minimize losses. 

As usual, this varies across whichever online games you are playing, but a very basic concept (the same underlying concept as card counting in blackjack) can be applied across all: 

a) Start on medium stakes (relative to your bankroll control)
b) Monitor your variances (are you consecutively losing or winning more)
c) Increase your stakes when you’re consecutively losing
d) Decrease your stakes when you’re consecutive winning

For example, if you’re playing roulette and you’ve bet 10 euros on black and lost 10 times in a row, it may be time to put a much larger bet to catch your variance upswing.

Similarly, let’s say if you’ve been following our blackjack guide(link) and you’re doing well, maybe up 500 euros after playing on 20-euro bets for an hour, you might want to consider dropping your stakes to 10- or 5-euros bets per hand.

Let’s get back to variances for a second. 

If the universe is balanced and your variance swings even out eventually, it would be a graph that looks like this:

That means if you make the same bet over and over again, at 100% equity (true odds = payout odds), you will always eventually break even.

But we’ve gone through a multitude of reasons why the long term is disadvantageous to the player with online casinos and gaming (we’ll expand more later on this).

Now let’s imagine that when on your ‘A’ upswing, where you’re winning a lot, you bet 50 euros per bet, on average. In contrast on your ‘B’ downswing, you’re betting only 10 euros on average per bet. Basically, when you’re winning, you’re winning big bets. When you’re losing, you’re losing small bets.

You would come up significantly on top.

While this perfect scenario is never realistically achievable, this is the concept we’re trying to apply through Range Control; and to maximize profits while minimizing losses.

Recap 1: Staying ahead of the curve

If we take into account variance, full equity and the same bet and bet amount, extrapolated into perpetuity, you would win 50% of the time, and break even in terms of the bet amount. 

But we don’t want to break even; we want to win! 

Of the things mentioned above, you have control (or at least, applicable knowledge) over all except 1: the casino’s control of payout. The slight advantage in equity (house edge) is all the difference, especially taking into account the casino deals with so many players, most of them without the knowledge we’ve just discussed. 

But for the individual savvy players like you who’s going to make their own luck, you’ll know that you don’t have to win more than 50% of the time. Right?

In fact, if you apply the above tactics, even if you win 20-30% of the time, you’ll come out ahead if the amount you win is larger than the amount you lose. 

If you win 2 x 100-euro bets, but lose 8 x 5-euro bets, you’re still ahead. That’s a 20%-win rate with a 160-euro profit. 

Recap 2: Can you beat online casinos?

That’s the wrong question. The right one(s) are:

Can you:

1. Choose the right casino for you with the best starting advantages (link quiz)
2. Decide if you’re in it for fun and avoid the biggest reasons for losing winnings (link above)
3. Stick to your bankroll with winning and losing limits to minimize your losses(link)
4. Only go in on bets when you have good equity(link)
5. Apply betting range control to maximize winnings(link)
6. Use the best strategies for each game you play(link)
7. And finally, take breaks (whether or not you apply time limits) (link)

If you can, it’s time to choose from these best betting sites and start having fun while making your own luck.